Abstract: The trend to use large amounts of simple sensors as opposed to a few complex sensors to monitor places and systems creates a need for temporal pattern mining algorithms to work on such data. The methods that try to discover re-usable and interpretable patterns in temporal event data have several shortcomings. We contrast several recent approaches to the problem, and extend the T-Pattern algorithm, which was previously applied for detection of sequential patterns in behavioural sciences. The temporal complexity of the T-pattern approach is prohibitive in the scenarios we consider. We remedy this with a statistical model to obtain a fast and robust algorithm to find patterns in temporal data. We test our algorithm on a recent database collected with passive infrared sensors with millions of events.

Abstract: Social media, as a major platform for communication and information exchange, is a rich repository of the opinions and sentiments of 2.3 billion users about a vast spectrum of topics. In this sense, user text interactions are widely used to sense the whys of certain social user’s demands and cultural- driven interests. However, the knowledge embedded in the 1.8 billion pictures which are uploaded daily in public profiles has just started to be exploited. Following this trend on visual-based social analysis, we present a novel methodology based on neural networks to build a combined image-and-text based personality trait model, trained with images posted together with words found highly correlated to specific personality traits. So, the key contribution in this work is to explore whether OCEAN personality trait modeling can be addressed based on images, here called MindPics, appearing with certain tags with psychological insights. We found that there is a correlation between posted images and the personality estimated from their accompanying texts. Thus, the experimental results are consistent with previous cyber-psychology results based on texts, suggesting that images could also be used for personality estimation: classification results on some personality traits show that specific and characteristic visual patterns emerge, in essence representing abstract concepts. These results open new avenues of research for further refining the proposed personality model under the supervision of psychology experts, and to further substitute current textual personality questionnaires by image-based ones.

Abstract: We present a novel method for human action recognition (HAR) based on estimated poses from image sequences. We use 3D human pose data as additional information and propose a compact human pose representation, called a weak pose, in a low-dimensional space while still keeping the most discriminative information for a given pose. With predicted poses from image features, we map the problem from image feature space to pose space, where a Bag of Poses (BOP) model is learned for the final goal of HAR. The BOP model is a modified version of the classical bag of words pipeline by building the vocabulary based on the most representative weak poses for a given action. Compared with the standard k-means clustering, our vocabulary selection criteria is proven to be more efficient and robust against the inherent challenges of action recognition. Moreover, since for action recognition the ordering of the poses is discriminative, the BOP model incorporates temporal information: in essence, groups of consecutive poses are considered together when computing the vocabulary and assignment. We tested our method on two well-known datasets: HumanEva and IXMAS, to demonstrate that weak poses aid to improve action recognition accuracies. The proposed method is scene-independent and is comparable with the state-of-art method.